Foy Valentine was director of the Christian Life Commission and a board member of the American Baptist Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, where “we were involved on every front in a thousand different ways trying to bring about change.” In this capacity, as a white leader in the Baptist church, Valentine urged fellow Baptists to confront their denomination's racist past and move toward integrati

Quotes from interviews with this actor are listed below. To see excerpts from interview transcripts, click on the associated Excerpts link below each quote.

"...I … was one of the white, I'd say, establishment leaders to affirm them and encourage them wherever I could."

"I think what ended up getting our family involved in the civil rights movement was the way we looked at the scripture and the heavy emphasis on God's concern for the poor and on justice. "
—Spencer Perkins

"...I tried to impress upon young people especially, that it is not by might... [not by] all that you know, but it is... by [the] willingness to listen to your peers and to your elders, and also by the grace of God that we have come a long way."
—Johnnie Rebecca Daniels Carr

"[The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission operated as] something akin to NKVD (the public and secret police in the Soviet Union during the reign of Joseph Stalin) among the cotton patches. "
—Wilson Minor

"And I said to my wife, I said 'Honey, if we gonna make it different in Menden Hall... We’re gonna have to stay in town long enough that we can... help them get a love for God, a love for themselves, and a love for the community.'"
—John Perkins

"But we remember that as we boycott that the boycott is not an end within itself....[The] end is reconciliation the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community."
—Martin Luther King